Ep 217: Lavarephobia: The Fear of Bathrooms
It’s spoopky season. In the past on the show, we talked about a number of scary topics. While a lot of these exit the bathroom or talk about creatures that people have invented or confronted that are of a scarier nature, most of those take a fear and place it in the bathroom.
Way back in the start, in the early days of the show, we discussed being pee or bladder shy and how it was related to urophobia. Technically, it is fear of doing something private in a public space. That phenomenon, observed before we even started looking at spoopky season, looked at a bit of the psychology of being pee shy.
Today’s spoopky season topic is another bathroom specific phobia. In fact, it is specifically fear of the bathroom. Lavarephobia is the intense and unexplainable fear of bathrooms, both public and personal.
The number of times we have discussed a bathroom in some way on this show during the spoopky season, we have talked about things that happen in, live in, come from, and smell like the bathroom that people could possibly be afraid of.
However, we have not discussed people just being afraid of the bathroom in general. What is this fear, is there any history to it, and what is the path forward for someone who experiences this very specific fear?
What’s in a Name
Lavarephobia comes from the Latin term lavare, which means to wash. This is not merely a fear of washing. Rather, it is a fear of the place you go to wash, the washroom if you will, or as we lay people call it the bathroom, or if you prefer, the privy.
Lavatory comes from the same word. This fear of the bathroom is a modern phenomenon to be observed, but it isn’t modern REALLY. There is a long history of people not liking or avoiding or having a less than positive view of the bathroom.
In very ancient times, there were no “bathrooms”. In so far as any bush or tree stump would suffice, those were your “bathrooms”. However, even in these cultures there were often laws or standards about where a person could go, or if they didn’t have rules about where (usually outside of where the people were living), there were rules about what you had to do with poo after you poo’d it (usually take it outside of where people are living).
There is an early and innate aversion to bathrooming that we have discussed on the show, related to people’s perception of death and disease, connected to the smell.
When people started to build structures and devices for going to the bathroom, they did not at first make them personal and private. The Greek and Roman cultures are famous for their communal baths and toilets. It’s a peculiar thing. The aversion seems directly tied to the actual poop and pee, the byproduct of the stuff and not the making or person making the stuff. In these cultures, to poop next to your best friend into the Roman sewer is totally normal, but if your best friend poops in the street outside your house, bad.
Aversion then is tied to cleanliness and hygiene. As long as the bathroom experience was perceived as hygienic, it got a pass. In some cases throughout history, what was perceived as clean, and what was clean, were two different things.
Scary Pore Opening
No one else knew this better than the folks living in the Medieval period, who thanks to cholera and the black death, both of which were not helped by perceptions of cleanliness, resulted in thousands dead. There was an actual fear not only of washrooms, but of “washing” at the time.
They believed that the hot water which would open up the person’s pores (crazy they had scienced that part out) would actually release death into the air (especially when they applied the humors to their reasons for why). So, washing could release a demon or a disease on someone else, a real thing, real people, were actually afraid of.
In 1530, what was one of the first texts related to manners was written and in it, there was a fascinating new addition to the etiquette.
Erasmus, who has also popped up on the show, wrote a text called on the Civility of Children, or Etiquette for Young Boys. In it, he details a number of pretty sensible etiquette pieces. One of those is that if a person is relieving themselves by the way, do not approach them and introduce yourself, it’s not time for that.
Some online articles note that if they had to say this, it probably meant that young boys had a habit or had grown up with it as a norm for doing so. Those who could afford to poop in private, did so, and those who couldn’t, were peasants and pooped in the street like a commoner. In the 16-1800s having a place to go to the bathroom that was not in public was a matter of class difference.
This shift, that pooping in private was better, more sophisticated than pooping with a friend, started the trajectory wherein the bathroom experience for people became more and more privatized. In time, we would arrive at the bathrooms we have today, everyone has one, and almost everyone has access to a public one.
However, it’s that personal part that is probably more the concern and separates on the basis of class.
This is all just culture and norms shifting, it doesn’t start to explain how the bathroom got inside of people’s heads or how people’s thinking changed about the bathroom.
Getting in our Heads
As people began to observe these behaviors and aversions in the wild, they began to ask, why are people not pooping around each other as much. Better yet, there started to be documentation. Fear spread of washing spaces and washrooms and sanitation and other infrastructure was not as developed. Because those were the places people would go to poop, it got a bad rap for some time as being not very sanitary.
Privacy started to be the standard for all in this area. If you wanted to use the bathroom, where you were once not guaranteed or could expect a level of privacy. They started to look at what made people’s brains make this shift.
At the time, a relatively new field of study was emerging. In it, people were trying to explain what made people do the things they did. One of the people pioneering in the space was a man named Sigmund Freud. He theorized that a child’s thinking about the bathroom would be directly related to how their parents spoke about and taught them about the bathroom as they were being potty trained. The idea is, a kid will view the bathroom as private if his parents treat the potty training experience as private.
I think the extension of this is… if a parent makes the bathroom experience something where you don’t shut the door and it’s more public, you have these bathroom intruders who will just outright walk in on you without any sort of notice. I may have accidentally raised these, but we are working out of it for sure.
If somehow you made bathrooms scary, usually through some level of overreaction or something, someone could develop a phobia or a fear related to the bathroom. Personally, I think Freud is blaming a lot on the parents. Rather, if parents are teaching their kids things related to the bathroom that is going to go a lot farther.
Fear, related to childhood baggage, if that baggage is brought into the bathroom, could easily explain how people developed. This all got grouped in when the smell started to get mixed up. When that stank just hits your nostrils, something that has been associated with death and decay, now coupled with anxiety and notions possibly from what you’ve picked up socially, those aversions can combine in the world to be a fear or a phobia.
This brings us to today.
Lavarephobia
Lavarephobia is something that they started to identify as a phenomenon in very recent times. Up until then, it would just be labeled fear of public space, fear of peeing or pooping in public. Fear of germs or other hygiene related things also pop up a lot in the bathroom space.
These were all different from what counselors and other shrinks started to be described. People were afraid of the bathroom. And not just going to the bathroom, they had a fear of bathroom spaces.
In the most mild cases of lavarephobia, they have anxiety, panic, and unwanted distress around public bathrooms or unfamiliar toilets. In the most severe cases, lavarephobia keeps a person from making them afraid of their own personal bathroom. The trouble is, while this can be a problem in severe cases, it leaves you with very little options.
Everybody pees and poops, and in the most debilitating instances, those with lavarephobia have to come up with… we’ll just say more creative outlets to go to the bathroom. So, if you are afraid of the bathroom, we might have something that can help. A podcast that you can listen to, wherever you are, bathroom or otherwise, which is MADE in the bathroom and covers all things bathrooms.
As we’ve discussed over the years, there are plenty of scary or scary adjacent things which happen in or come from the bathrooms, but the bathrooms themselves, as long as they are pretty clean and orderly, are not that big of a concern.
